Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz traveled to Waynesboro, Georgia on Thursday to issue approximately $6.5 billion in loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. The reactors will be the first new nuclear facilities in about three decades.

The terms of the loan agreement were tentatively offered to Southern Company in 2010, but low natural gas prices, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and a lack of a federal carbon policy have hampered nuclear power. The loan guarantee was also sidelined by Solyndra's bankruptcy, which rattled the DOE loan program.

Since becoming the head of the U.S. Department of Energy, Moniz has repeatedly talked about small modular reactors, pointing to their benefits in terms of cost and security. Last year, the DOE issued about $250 million to fund the demonstration of the technology.

But the loan guarantee just issued is for more traditional nuclear technology: a pair of 1,100-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors. The total project will cost more than $14 billion, according to Reuters.

Georgia Power, which is part of Southern Company, owns nearly half the plant. Oglethorpe Power Corporation has a 30 percent share, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia owns 22.7 percent and the City of Dalton, Georgia owns just over 1 percent.

The loan guarantee is split between Georgia Power ($3.46 billion) and OPC ($3.05 billion) with a separate outstanding loan guarantee for $1.8 billion that the DOE has until the end of July to finalize.

“The construction of new nuclear power facilities like this one -- which will provide carbon-free electricity to well over a million American energy consumers -- is not only a major milestone in the Administration’s commitment to jumpstart the U.S. nuclear power industry, it is also an important part of our all-of-the-above approach to American energy as we move toward a low-carbon energy future,” Secretary Moniz said in a statement.

Despite Moniz's hearty endorsement of the project, the DOE is just dipping its toe in the water. At one point, the DOE loan program was looking at about $50 billion in loans for nuclear. Many will be watching Vogtle for cost overruns and delays, which have already plagued the project. Westinghouse claims the AP1000 is the most economic nuclear power plant available worldwide because of its simplified design.

But some environmentalists are already questioning whether the project can come in on time and on schedule.

“A high rate of construction cancelation and history of massive cost overruns have caused Wall Street investors to shun reactor projects,” said the environmental non-profit Friends of the Earth in a statement. “Nuclear reactors are too risky to finance, too slow to build and too dangerous to be part of a meaningful energy solution.”

At the same time, other nuclear power plants are closing. San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California was taken offline two years ago after radioactive leaks were detected. The plant will not reopen. Other nuclear facilities, like Vermont’s Yankee nuclear power plant, will also close later this year.

In the case of the Yankee plant and others, they are simply losing out to low-cost natural gas in energy markets. Additionally, any nuclear plants that are reaching the end of their lifespan will either have to undergo expensive upgrades or be retired in the next ten to fifteen years.

Katherine Tweed writes on smart grid, demand response, energy efficiency and home networking for Greentech Media. Her freelance work has appeared in a range of media outlets, from Scientific American and FoxNews to Audubon Magazine and Men’s Health. She has a master’s degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting from New York University. Katherine never leaves her electronics in ...

To put the number in perspective, the 2.2 GWatts that the two new reactors will generate is about the same as the average output of all of the solar PV in the entire United States (based on the 10GW of installed PV reported by the SEIA as of 3Q2013). They'll generate power rain or shine, day or night. Most likely they'll still be producing clean and affordable power 60 years from now. The Vogtle plant also has two existing reactors from the 1980s which put out an additional 2.4 GWatts.

That's the contribution to a clean environment that the people of Geogia (led by their utility Geogia Power) have chosen to make. I suppose critics could say that they are taking the easy route to a non-fossil electric grid, since Sweden, Switzerland, and France all eliminated nearly all of the fossil fuels from their electricity more than 20 years ago (using a combination of hydro and nuclear), without the modern safety and operational improvements the Georgia plant will be getting.

As an added bonus, they can still add in all of the energy efficiency that they can muster, since the door to efficiency is never closed. Similarly, if they wish to use some of their copious biomass resource to make dispatchable electricity for peaking or transportation fuel, then those doors are also open.

Glad to see these plants being built and I hope they actually get finished in 2017 and 2018. However, I don't think these large nuclear plants are the way to go. I have a hard time envisioning any regions of the US other than SE installing reactors like these in the next 10 years. Only hope for nuclear in the medium-term is SMRs. We need smaller, more nimble reactors that can actually be financed.

In the mean time, solar will continue to decrease in price and will continue to be installed in increasing amounts. In the same SEIA link you included you could have found the chart below which shows that more than 22GW of solar will be installed before the end of 2016 - tripling the 10GW solar market size you mention. This is all before the first of these two plants goes online.

or you could go here - http://www.solarbuzz.com/news/recent-findings/us-solar-photovoltaic-pipeline-grows-43-gigawatts-enough-power-more-six-million]

to see that US Solar pipeline has now reached 43GW.

The real question out there is what happens next. For nuclear - Watts Bar 2 - maybe online by end of 2015,two Vogtle units online - 2017 and 2018. Summer units - 2018 and 2019. Note: all of these are in Southeast.

After that - what's next for nuclear? a bunch of maybes that won't be online till 2024 and again all in Southeast.

For Solar it all depends on what the price is after ITC expires after 2016. However, there are no indications on the near-term horizon that solar will not continue its price drop and I beleive it will easily be competive at end of 2016.

So solar will continue to install large amounts of capacity in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as these nuclear plants come online. If prices continue to drop it will install even larger amounts of capacity between 2020 and 2024 while ZERO nuclear will come online.

We need smaller nuclear plants - 300MW or so that can go live within 2-3 years of conception with cost of $1B or less so that that can be privately financed. We need to expand new nuclear installations out of Southeast to NorthEast, Mideast, Texas and maybe Midwest. Looking forward to seeing a press release on this site showing an SMR being installed in Texas by 2020. In the mean time, I hope we continue to install copious amounts of solar and wind.

In Southern California, the closing of SONGS has opened the door for more energy efficiency and renewable energy to meet the capacity loss.

This is nonsense.

California gets 25% of its electrical energy from renewable sources. 20% comes from unscalable hydro and biomass. Less than 5% comes from solar and wind, variable sources which must be backed up by natural gas, the state's primary source.

What the closing of SONGS accomplished was to burn more natural gas - lots of it, resulting in an increase in California's carbon emissions of 35%. This disastrous outcome was wholly predictable, and had only an indirect relationship to the malfunctioning turbine which spilled 80 gallons of slightly radioactive water inside the plant. It was the direct result of NRDC and other antinuclear organizations seizing an opportunity to allay the ignorant fears of their contributor base. In essence, they filed enough lawsuits to convince Southern California Edison to pack their bags, build $13 billion in new fossil fuel plants, and bill ratepayers. Now that the bill is coming due, the crusaders are realizing how much their pathetically ill-informed gambit will cost and seek to blame the company. This, too, was entirely predictable.

While it all plays out in court, the chances of solar, wind, and efficiency ever making up the deficit in clean energy are nil.

I toured SONGS in 2010 and was thoroughly impressed by the level of commitment and professionalism of everyone I met there. For all Californians who care about the environment and understand basic principles of energy SONGS was a source of pride, and there are millions of us who are not giving up the fight against misguided policies which only make efforts to curb climate change more difficult.

Bob, I agree that closing of SONGS was a stupid move. California lost 18M megawatt hours of carbon free energy which was equal to about 9% of its net energy generation.

However, I wanted to add a couple of comments

1) the big increase in natural gas electricty production and the subsequent 35% increase in carbon emissions for 2012 was not entirely caused by nuclear shutdown. There was also a drop in Hydro production of 16M megawatt hours frm 2011 to 2012 - so in reality just over half of the CO2 increase can be attributed to SONGS shutdown.

2) also not sure where you get the 5% number for solar and wind production in CA. Perhaps that was from EIA 2012 numbers? which show 5.6% from wind and solar.

The EIA numbers for 2013 are now out and they show 8.9% for wind and solar in CA. However, those EIA numbers grossly underestimate grid-connected solar and they do not count "behind the meter" solar at all. So actual solar and wind from grid-connected was probably about 9.4% and if you throw in behind the meter solar then "real total" for wind and solar in CA for 2013 was at least 10%. Looking at 2014 this will easily top 12%.

Not a good move to throw away the 9% of carbon-free from SONGS though. California would be close to 50% carbon-free if we had that(18%Nuclear, 12%Wind/Solar,10% Hydro, 10% Other(Geothermal & Biomass). So it was definitely a step backwards. It will take at least 5 years for Solar and Wind to make up for this loss.

Joe, EIA does track behind-the-meter solar using the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). It's an estimate based on a complex methodology which is nonetheless fairly throrough and included in EIA's solar statistics. Not included is dispersed generation (generation not connected to the grid at all) but DG includes the vast majority of residential and commercial solar installations:

Distributed and dispersed generation technologies generate electricity near the particular load they are intended to serve, such as a residential home or commercial building. EIA defines distributed generation (DG) as being connected to the electrical grid and intended to directly offset retail sales, and dispersed generation as being off-grid and often used for remote applications where grid-connected electricity is cost-prohibitive. Dispersed generation in the buildings sector is not currently gathered by EIA electricity surveys or modeled in the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), largely because of the difficulty in tracking installations and consumption.

In 2013 CA generated 3.9 TWh of solar and 13.2TWh of wind vs. 200TWh combined, so the latest figures show solar generating less than 2% of California's energy, including distributed generation.

Solar and wind can be effective in displacing fossil-fueled energy, thereby reducing emissions. Yet there's no evidence that carbon-free nuclear capacity can be replaced by renewables without raising emissions - in fact there's considerable evidence to the contrary. There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon, including variability and inefficiencies. What makes you think solar and wind can ever "make up" for this loss?

I can assure that the EIA does not capture any behind the meter data.In fact they don't even capture all grid-connected solar. Even CAISO who has much more accurate data about Solar in CA does not capture any "behind the meter". Below are some links you can look at to see this better.

1) If you look at the bottom of any EIA Electricity generation data you will that source data is collected with form EIA-923. Here are the instructions for that form. - http://www.eia.gov/survey/form/eia_923/instructions.pdf

Note this instruction:"The Form EIA-923 is a mandatory report for all electric power plants and CHP plants that meet the following criteria: 1) have a total generator nameplate capacity (sum for generators at a single site) of 1 megawatt (MW) or greater."

So not only do they not collect rooftop data they also miss out any solar installations that are smaller than 1MW and there are plent of these smaller installations.

2) CAISO has a much better handle on solar in CA in that they actually measure what is generated on their grid daily. However, CAISO does not include all of CA. For instance a lot of LA (LADWP) is not under their authority, neither is SMUD in Sacramento etc.. The estimate is that they control about 80% of State. CAISO numbers show 5.5 TWh of solar for 2013. However, like I said that does not include 20% of state. So let's add another 1.0TWh for these areas of grid-connected Solar. Again CAISO does not collect behind the meter - so again we could probably throw in at least another 1.5TWh for these installation for a total of approximately 8.0TWh for soalr in CA in 2013.

3) One last point - I have asked about this discrepancy to both CAISO and EIA- here is answer

"We don’t see any distributed generation that is behind the meter. So, the systems in your examples are behind the meter as they aren’t large enough to interconnect to the high voltage grid (which is 1 MW). "

So using my calculations the EIA numbers for solar are off by 2x. Again, like you say these are pretty small numbers but in a few years they will have to fix their collection methodology as solar continues to ramp up.

Below is an example of CAISO daily collection data from last Wed. Solar totals for Jan/Feb are running at a growth rate of 100%+ from last year.

FInally in reponse to your question. I don't think solar/wind should be replacing nuclear. However, by 2030 solar and wind generation in CA will easily surpass 50TWh. Hopefully, by then SMRs might have been accepted elsewhere in US and there would be a chance for them to be implemented in CA.

Joe, I'm not sure what you're considering "behind the meter", an imprecise designation which could refer to either distributed generation or dispersed generation.

Distributed solar generation makes up the bulk of residential and commercial solar. EIA doesn't capture this data directly - it can't - so it estimates it using NEMS, as I pointed out before. These estimates are indeed integrated into EIA statistics:

The National Energy Modeling System (NEMS)2 is an integrated model of the U.S. energy industry detailing economic, energy-related, and environmental aspects of energy production, distribution, and consumption. NEMS was designed and built over several years by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA (1996) uses NEMS to forecast U.S. energy production, imports, conversion, price, and consumption to 2015, which is documented in the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO96).

There are plenty of articles out there that discuss EIA does not collect behind the meter solar for their generation numbers. They have improved their collection of total solar capacity but not generation. Here is one recent article that mentions this.

"Not included in these numbers is the amount of generation that comes from rooftop solar and other distributed generation sources. That generation lowers electricity retail sales. While the amount of generation coming from these sources is not available, the Energy Information Administration is working on plugging that data gap."

Answers:

1. http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/california.asp

"Approximately 80% of demand in the CAMX subregion is within the area of the CAISO balancing authority."

Re: #3, the "Institute for Energy Research" is a right-wing free market advocacy website, and their link leads to a dead page on EIA. Similarly, renewables industry websites are notorious for hyping their product with a labyrinth of dead links and links to other similar websites.

Though CAISO would have nothing to do with it, I'll take the EIA's own word that "behind the meter" distributed generation is represented in their data using the NEMS model.

"Though CAISO would have nothing to do with it, I'll take the EIA's own word that "behind the meter" distributed generation is represented in their data using the NEMS model."

Bob, Obviously you can believe whatever you want. However, I have email addresses of folks at EIA that you can talk to on this if you want. I already had this conversation with them and they confirmed what I am saying.

They are working on improving the collection of solar generation data but not there yet. They did however, recently fix earlier issues with having accurate Total Solar Capacity.